"Gosh! I didn't realize how much discussion my original article would create. A lot of people seemed to accuse me of living in cloud cuckoo land, whereas a lot more agreed with me. I think those who disagreed have either never used RISC OS or just liked a good rant! In either case, I feel compelled to write a short follow up article clarifying some of the points I made in the original article - all of which were perfectly valid." Read the follow up article.

Acorn's peak was in the 1980s, with the BBC Micro. By the 1990s (when I was at what the US would term "high school"), schools had already begun to replace their BBC Micros with PCs, mainly with Nimbus machines from RM. From 1987 when the first Archimedes came out, I never saw a trace of a RISC OS-based machine. By then, Windows had already won.

I used RISC OS until shortly after Acorn imploded in 1998. It had some lovely features, but nowadays, it just looks quite dated, which is quite sad. There are still a number of compelling applications for it - thanks to the efforts of Martin Wuerthner and Peter Naulls, amongst others - but I see no real reason why I should switch back. The platform is on the decline, and it seems to be the same old people sticking with the platform until their dying days.

Where are the grand plans for RISC OS? Some (all, eventually?) of it is being open-sourced, which might lead to more development on that side. Peter Naulls (Firefox) and the Netsurf guys are doing a sterling job on the browser side and Artworks is still an outstanding vector graphics application.

And the hardware? Castle Technology are selling a three year old 600MHz Iyonix which offers less than a Mac mini. The Iyonix is nice enough, but totally overpriced for what it is. There have been few developments on the hardware side since it was originally released, save a slightly less antique graphics card.